DiGiCo, L-Acoustics and Sennheiser perform under pressure on Britain’s Got Talent. LSi reports …
UK – 2015 is the ninth year that Britain’s Got Talent has brought the weird, wonderful, musical and unusual to UK television screens. The live judges’ auditions for the latest series took place in January and February, with Sennheiser, DiGiCo and L-Acoustics equipment taking care of much of the audio input, mixing and output.
With audio production equipment supplied by Delta Sound, Hotcam and Presteigne Broadcast Hire, the auditions took place in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Manchester and London. Now that the Britain’s Got Talent audio team has eight series under its collective belt, both equipment and workflow have been honed to ensure that the complex production runs like a well-oiled machine.
“We’ve had our usual share of singers, comedians, dog acts and so on this year but, unlike past series, where we used to get a lot of rock bands and individual musicians, this time more of the music acts are choirs and mixed bands,” says Sean Taylor, sound supervisor. “For example we’re getting orchestras with beat boxers and rappers. It means there is a much greater dynamic range to deal with and it’s more of a challenge, but that’s the nature of the show. We take it all in our stride.”
A package containing, amongst other mics, wired Sennheiser MKH 60s and 8070s, plus handheld vocal microphones comprising SKM 5200 wireless bodies with cardioid capsules alongside Wisycom radio camera receivers with Sennheiser companders. “We’re constantly fighting RF issues, because the expansion of digital television is nuking every frequency we want,” Taylor continues. “As a result we’re now squeezing far too much into far too little spectrum. We have about six different areas of filming happening at any one time, with microphones that are walked from one area to the next. If we were at a normal show we’d be turning things off and using those frequencies for other things, but the nature of Britain’s Got Talent means we can’t. As a result, we’ve got about 70 frequencies running at any one time.”
Taylor says: “Our RF engineer Colin Bowman, has helped a lot, but even they can’t change the fact that the radio spectrum is being squeezed to the point of being almost infinitesimally small.”
The Britain’s Got Talent auditions have a major DiGiCo presence, with an SD5 mixing the performances to the live PA, an SD11 for the performers’ recorded playback, an SD8 for the two-way conversations between judges and contestants, another for the main audio monitoring and sub-mix functions and an SD8-24 for the direct MADI feeds to the JoeCo BlackBox units for the multitrack recording.
“The performances aren’t pre-rehearsed and the playback from the SD11 is what the contestants have recorded and practised with at home, which they bring in with them. It comes in a range of forms – on CD, cassette, MiniDisc, iPod, phone – all sorts of different media,” says Fred Jackson, audio consultant.
“We get a little listen to each source and then, thanks to a lot of tweaking in the SD5, it comes out in an acceptable manner. The console gives us the flexibility to do that; the judges need to hear a proper track, rather than something woolly, but ultimately backing tracks are what people turn up with.”
Everything is recorded on JoeCo BlackBox multitrack recorders, with a streamlined MADI recording path making for high quality capture with little fuss. “We’ve got 56 channels coming off the recording SD8, plus local record for eight more channels inside it – just for crowd mics and other bits and pieces – and it’s running straight off the MADI stream,” says Taylor.
“It makes it very easy because it’s just a succession of three BNC connectors to the edit suite . . . it’s a lot easier compared to the 600 cables we had in the past.”
Delivering a high quality production to the auditions’ live audience is every bit as important as the recorded material for television broadcast, so an L-Acoustics system PA was specified: this comprised left-right ground-stacked K2 arrays, with 115XT HiQs for the judges’ centre-fill, plus Kiva and Kilo side-fills.
“The side-fills are really important because they’re located behind LED screens which are absolutely fixed; we’re not allowed to interfere with them at all. Having six Kiva and two Kilo per side makes for a really tight, compact, system. It’s the ideal solution,” says Jackson.
For stage monitoring, the difficult task of combining sound for the performers while not interfering with camera angles means that K-array ultra-low profile KJ50vb Ninjas are one of the few loudspeakers capable of fulfilling the tough brief.
“The whole thing is a bit of an audio battlefield, but nowadays we’ve calmed it down a little. The ‘United Nations’ of Delta Sound and Sennheiser have helped a great deal to stop the war!” smiles Taylor. “Before these auditions I get a list of those who passed the producer auditions, so I know it’s a man with a guitar, or two men with two guitars, a girl with a dog or a choir with rappers who are coming through, but until it actually appears on stage that’s about as much information as we get. It happens as it happens. Nowadays, we do some sound checks, but it’s pretty much all unrehearsed. People will also change their minds and do something completely different to what we were expecting. So you’ve got to have enough flexibility in the system, without carrying around so much equipment that it ends up costing a fortune. The system we have is enough to cope with most things, from a small orchestra through to a 140-piece choir.”
“We used to be up until 1am doing EQ, then were back in at 7-8am, averaging getting out around 9pm, but everything’s come together a lot more cohesively this year,” concludes Jackson. “Jon Bell and the team at Delta Sound have given us both great equipment and tremendous support, which has made a real difference.”
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